Question of the Week: Growing Up In Your Family

Of late, I have been enjoying long fruitful conversations with both my brother and my sister. It is not just a blood relationship. They are the only two individuals on a planet of nearly seven billion who can provide me with a ground-level perspective of the unlikely world I found myself dragged kicking and screaming into. In many ways, they have validated my experiences. In other ways they have opened my eyes.

We know bipolar is a biological illness, but there is also a very strong environmental component, including the family influences that shaped us, both for better and worse. Perhaps, given a different set of circumstances, my bipolar may have never manifested. Or maybe it would have been a lot worse. What I do know is that my conversations have been a very healing exercise, for me and the two people who grew up under the same roof.